First film footage of remote Amazon rainforest tribe

New pictures have been released of an isolated tribe living in rainforest on the Brazil-Peru border.

Brazil monitors many such tribes from the air, and they are
known as "uncontacted" because they have only limited dealings with the
outside world.

Photographs of the same tribe were released to the world two years ago.

Campaigners say the Panoan Indians are threatened by a rise in illegal logging on the Peruvian side of the border.

But Brazilian authorities believe the influx of loggers is
pushing isolated Indians from Peru into Brazil, where the two groups
could come into conflict.

Survival International, the campaign group that released the
pictures, says the group is likely to be in good health, with baskets
full of manioc and papaya vegetables grown in their communal "gardens".

The tribe in question could be descended from indigenous
people who fled the "rubber boom" around a century ago, when wild rubber
became an international commodity and forest areas were opened up.

The tribe has a communal garden where banana and annatto trees grow

These pictures were taken by Brazil's Indian Affairs
Department, which monitors the indigenous groups using aircraft. The
remote tribe has also been filmed by the BBC for its Human Planet
series.

Members of the tribe are seen covered in red paint (known as
urucum), which is made from seeds from the annatto shrub. Indigenous
people use it to colour hammocks and baskets, as well as their skin.

The group is also seen using steel machetes - which must
ultimately have been obtained from outside the forest. Fiona Watson,
field and research director for Survival International, said the people
are likely to have acquired these through trading links with other
forest tribes.

"These networks have been in existence for centuries and I
don't think they will have had any contact with non-tribal people,
because if they had, the chances of being killed or contracting a
disease to which they have no immunity are very high," said Ms Watson.

Ms Watson added that some authorities denied the existence of such tribal groups in the forest, in order to further their aims.

One
wonders what these people make of these strange noisy things hovering
in the air above them. The narrator says the foorage is taken from a
very long distance away with specially adpated enses, but still.